Carter

 

Since Jimmy Carter died very few people have said he he was a good or even an adequate president. That would be a hard sell. Instead there has been a consensus from people in the traditional media (much like the years long consensus that Joe Biden was mentally competent) that after leaving office he had a great post-presidential life and career, perhaps the greatest of any American president.

That would be wrong even if people restricted their consideration only to the benign or beneficial things Carter did. To cite three obvious examples, John Quincy Adams served several terms in the house of representatives after leaving the presidency, consistently opposed slavery in those years, and in the Amistad case successfully defended the kidnapped Africans who had taken over a Spanish slave ship. William Howard Taft served years as chief justice of the United States supreme court after losing reelection. Herbert Hoover worked to provide food and other relief to people in devastated areas of Europe after World War II and served the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as the head of commissions on reorganizing the administrative branch of the federal government.

However, a lot of what Carter after did after 1980 was neither benign nor beneficial. He meddled consistently in foreign policy, often excusing or even defending anti-American tyrants and terrorists. People who accused him of being an antisemite had evidence for doing so. He supported the anti-Israeli BDS movement, likened Israel to an apartheid state, and defended terrorist violence against Jews in Israel. While not as bad  an ex-president as he had been a president, he was bad enough.